In our most labor-intensive post ever, Jake Hofman and I have created, for every country in the world, a way to think of that country’s area and population in terms of US states. It’s all part of a larger project improving comprehension of numbers in the news. [See our working paper, a longer version of which was recently accepted at CHI 2016].

You’ll see 13 fascinating examples below. Check them out and come back to …

… educate yourself and contribute valuable data

We’re trying to advance the science of examples. What example should a teacher or journalist use when putting a country into perspective? For instance, in the image above, we could have said that Syria is about the same size as Washington but with three times the population. This is factually more accurate, but might also be more difficult for people to remember or use. So we thought we might get some feedback from readers and find out what makes appealing examples

Australia is about 10 times the size of Texas with about the same population

Austria is about the size of Virginia with about the same population

China is about the size of The United States with about 4 times the population

Germany is about the size of California with about twice the population

Iraq is about the size of California with about the same population

Israel is about the size of New Jersey with about the same population

Japan is about the size of California with about 3 times the population

Kenya is about the size of Texas with about twice the population

North Korea is about the size of New York with about the same population

Philippines is about the size of New Mexico with about 50 times the population

Turkey is about the size of Texas with about 3 times the population

United Kingdom is about the size of Wyoming with about 100 times the population

We’ve done something similar before, but just for area, and it didn’t have pictures. This is so much better (and harder). Want to reward our hard work? Go here, hit “random”, and give us precious training data.